Shovel ready? Just kidding, America!

In nearly two years of lobbying to pass and then defending the dismal results of his unstimulating stimulus bill, President Obama could be counted on to employ two words with clockwork regularity. No, not “Bush’s fault.” ”Shovel-ready.”

He keeps telling us so. On “Meet the Press,” fill-in host Tom Brokaw wants to know how quickly Barack Obama can create jobs, and the president-elect promises to move fast. After all, he says, he’s met with a bunch of governors “and all of them have projects that are shovel-ready.”

Announcing his energy team, Obama beams about “shovel-ready projects all across the country.” Unveiling his choice for education secretary, Obama plugs his plans “to start helping states and local governments with shovel-ready projects.”

So many shovels. All of them, apparently, quite ready.

All of them, apparently, quite ready to shovel a bunch of horse hockey to the American people. Now Obama tells the New York Times it was just a joke: “There’s really nothing — there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

April fools!

Conservatives knew this was a comedy act all along. I called it “Spinal Tap economics” back in January 2009. But it might have been good to let the rest of the American people in on the parody sooner — say, $870 billion ago.

The brilliance of this joke is that it can be retold in so many different settings. Try these variations out as a Halloween prank on your progressive friends and neighbors:

“There’s really nothing — there’s no such thing as hope.”

“There’s really nothing — there’s no such thing as change.”

“There’s really nothing — there’s no such thing as the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”